CS4803b Animation - Professor Jessica Hodgins

NEW NEWS: Midnight Mischief won two awards at Videopticon '99!!! It received an honorable mention (ie. second place) for BEST IN SHOW, and won the award for BEST NARRATIVE!!!
First of all, let me apologize for this lackluster web page! I am in the process of moving, it's 1:30 am and the only things left in my room are my computer and desk... so it was now or never 'cause the computer is the next thing that needs to be carried out of here! For CS4803b, each member of the class came up with a storyboard idea.  Then three storyboards were selected, and the class was divided into three groups to implement the animation in Maya.  Unfortunately, our group had some difficulties with too much and too little effort being exerted by various members of the group.  Out of eight original project members, six produced the final animation.  I hate to give some more credit than others, but... Steve Park, Gary Yngve, and myself were the ones without sleep in the end. I give that as an explanation for some of the strange cuts in the final piece.  Also, the entire piece was produced in about five weeks.  That five weeks also included the steep learning curve that comes with all of Alias/Wavefront's products.

The Storyboard

The Original Storyboard - The original storyboard is my work. It was modified by the group to allow for more animation seeing as how that was the purpose of the class.  The most obvious addition is the clock, which served as a commentary on the action of the computers.

Modeling and Lighting

I modeled the room, including the doors, window, posters and lighting effects (moonlight and sliver of light).  I also modeled the closet, dresser, sleeping figure in bed, and the desktop computer.  Other small models were added throughout, many of which were also my responsibility.  My only assignment was the desktop computer, therefore it was the most detailed. I am also quite pleased with the way the sleeping figure turned out.

My goal was to model as realistically as possible. The textures are inspired by the SGI O2's. Since most computer equipment has a manufacturer stamped on it, I put a "swirly" logo and GVU on each part. The "glow" special effect on materials allows for the realistic rendering of things such as the power light indicators and the screen glow.

Subtle details worth noticing:

The modeling of the room of course was fairly simple.  It has a basic window with trim, door with trim and baseboards.  I scoured the net for some posters and even found a picture of Georgia Tech Eighth Street dorms to use for outside the window.  Since the piece was at night, I also spent a good deal of time trying to work with lighting.  I had a sliver of light slipping in the door for the opening shot to establish "night," and also had moonlight coming in through the window.  For textures, I stuck to a blue/gray theme again to enhance the night mood.  The modeling of the room was not originally my assignment, thus it was not as detailed as I would have liked.

The bed was hard to model as I needed to have a person in it.  In the final piece, the covers move slightly as if the person were breathing.  The texture of the comforter was made by using a plaid file and applying a bump map to add some grid pattern puffs (like a quilt).

Other objects in the scene that I modeled include the dresser and closet.  Items like the lava lamp were animated, although this is barely noticeable in the final rendering.

Finally, some screen shots:
























Animation-wise, my major responsibilities were the monitor coming to life, the smoking computers, and the sleeping figure in bed.   I also animated the camera for all shots with a moving camera.  This responsibility required assembling animations from each group member, translating them in time, making subtle adjustments, etc.   Overall, it required a great deal of work to get everyone's separate files scaled and translated to the right position in the room coordinate system and to the right position in time. 

Funny little unnoticed problems (that often required 12 hr rerenderings...):  laptops suddenly snapping shut in a room pan, missing objects, the elusive floating white cone, missing lights, added lights (we used file references and sometimes people added lights in files without meaning to!), changed textures mid-rendering.... lots of fun.  Just to add on to all of that, our drive crashed at least four or five times... and we never had enough space.  The final frames were spread across four drives, each at 100% and used approximately 2 G of space!  Thank goodness we had a CNS (computing network services) guy on our team!  It made recovering drives at 4 am much easier ;)


Susan Fisher - sfisher@cs.unc.edu